Immigration comments and our angry politics of fear: Tim Rutten

Early last week, former Florida governor Jeb Bush — regarded by many as a likely candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination — ignited a fire storm of abuse with what seemed to any reasonable person an inarguable observation about undocumented immigrants.

Speaking to a gathering at his father’s presidential library in Texas, the younger Bush brother remarked that, for many newcomers without papers, undocumented immigration — with all its dangers and hardships — was an “act of love.” Bush mused, “Someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to this country because of their families — the dad who loved their children was worried that their child didn’t have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony ... It’s an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime. There should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families.” He went on to urge an end to the “harsh political rhetoric” around the immigration reform issue.

(Actually, his brother, George W. Bush, put the matter even more succinctly in his 2000 presidential campaign when he remarked, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.”)

It wasn’t the first time that Jeb Bush has strayed from the unbending anti-immigrant orthodoxy of the GOP’s so-called conservative grassroots. Less than a year ago, he echoed the consensus among most serious economists when he told the Faith and Freedom Conference that “immigrants created far more businesses than native-born Americans, over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.”

Within hours of his most recent comments, Bush was being accused on Fox News and across the right-wing recesses of the web of “betraying” not just his party’s principles, but also the nation’s. Even the more sober among his critics charged that Bush had all but disqualified himself from winning the GOP nomination by merely observing that most undocumented immigrants undertake the dangerous crossing of our border out of concern for their families’ well-being.

Charles Krauthammer labeled Bush’s comments “bizarre” and alleged that, politically, he was pointlessly “leading with his chin.” The National Review’s Jim Geraghty alleged that the remarks were among “these nagging indicators that he’s either not in touch with the mood of the conservative grassroots, or he’s willfully at odds with the conservative grassroots, and confident he can dissuade the grassroots of their opinion.” The Republican congressional leadership quickly disavowed the prospective candidate’s opinion, but that was nothing compared to the right-wing websites and commentators, who accused Bush of joining “the treason lobby” and even attacked his Mexican-born wife, falsely alleging that she had entered the country as an “illegal alien.”

The abuse showered on Bush contrasted starkly with the national Republicans’ silence last week, when their party’s leading California gubernatorial candidate — Twin Peaks Assemblyman Tim Donnelly — unflinching said he stands by remarks he made in 2006 as a leader of anti-immigrant vigilantes. “I am a descendant of Jim Bowie who died at Alamo,” he told his audience. “It is rumored that he took a dozen Mexican soldiers to their deaths before they finally killed him. How many of you will rise up and take his place on that wall. We are at war. You may not want to accept it, but the other side has declared war on us ... There is a growing insurgency right here in Los Angeles ... Right now, in the United States, there are 850,000 gang members, two-thirds of whom are illegal aliens.” Donnelly argued that the belief that undocumented immigrants come in search of a better life “is one of the lies. At least 20 percent are coming to commit the crimes that American criminals no longer will commit.”

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There’s so much mean-spirited wrong-headedness running through those remarks that they don’t bear dissection. Suffice to say, it’s easy to see why the latest Field Poll on the California governor’s race shows the Democratic incumbent Jerry Brown with 57 percent of the vote and Donnelly with 17 percent. Similarly, the sort of dismissive abuse hurled at Bush from across the country is a pretty good partial explanation of why the GOP has lost the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections.

Immigration reform is just one of the issues that festers unresolved because of the angry, resentful, inflexible, fantasy-fueled character of so much of our national political life. Jeb Bush, for example, is in most ways a candidate with impeccable conservative credentials. His financial conservatism has made him a Wall Street favorite. As governor of Florida, Bush — a convert to Catholicism — demonstrated a consistent social conservatism that won him a following among a large swath of the religious right. However, depart from the anxiously inflexible checklist orthodoxy that now dominates so much of our grassroots politics, and you’re a heretic banished to the outer darkness. (The same is increasingly true in many Democratic constituencies; no matter what your other credentials, try running in one of the party’s primaries if you try oppose any restriction on abortion, or maintain religious reservations about marriage equality.)

In his 1993 study of resurgent ethnic consciousness across the globe, “Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism,” Michael Ignatieff wrote: “I cannot help thinking that liberal civilization — the rule of laws, not men, of argument in place of force, of compromise in place of violence — runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature. The liberal virtues — tolerance, compromise, reason — remain as valuable as ever, but they cannot be preached to those who are mad with fear ...”

History suggests that we add compassionate humanity to those other virtues and the categorical rejection of its introduction into the national conversation on immigration reform is worse than alarming. The instantaneous and savage pillorying to which Jeb Bush was subjected this week is further evidence that the real crisis is not over this particular question of national policy, but in our increasingly angry and fearful politics themselves.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.